Crash and Burn
by wrldpossibility
Summary: Bella explores the contrast of fire and ice in her life. Written for the Twilight LAS community  Last Author Standing  at LJ.


**Name:** wrldpossibility

**Story Title:** Crash and Burn

**Character/Relationships:** Bella/Edward, mention of Jacob

**Rating:** PG

**Warnings:** none

**Summary: **_When Bella was seven, she fell on the ice (big surprise) at the skating rink down the street from her house (Renee's latest obsession), earning her the first of her many scars._

Crash and Burn

_Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice._  
_From what I ve tasted of desire,_  
_I hold with those who favor fire._

_-Robert Frost, Fire and Ice_

When Bella was seven, she fell on the ice (big surprise) at the skating rink down the street from her house (Renee's latest obsession), earning her the first of her many scars. There was nothing much memorable about this event-there would be plenty more falls-but as she'd slid across the surface, palms out to break her fall, what had struck first her was not the cold, but the burn.

In the years following, she began to suspect what she'd later know without a doubt, which is that hot and cold go hand-in-hand as surely as cause and effect, before and after, and beginning and end. Even previous to the ill-fated encounter with the ice, she had known plenty about heat-the dry Arizona burn at the back of her throat when the creosote bloomed, her mother s constantly smoldering passion for this, that, and the other thing-and chill-the relationships that fizzled, the single time it snowed in Phoenix (and melted within the hour).

She assumed this was why-a decade later-her body's answering warmth to the chill of Edward's skin hadn't shocked the way it should have the first time their fingers touched (just fingertip to fingertip around the smooth plastic of the microscope). And why, standing close to Jacob s side at her first bonfire, the heat of the flames had fed on the cold air until she'd felt a shiver run down her spine and goose bumps rise along her arms.

It hadn t always been this way, this simultaneous courting of fire and ice: more than once in the past, she d flat-out refused to visit Forks primarily on the basis of the weather. And of the times she _had_ gone, more often than not she'd shrunk from the cold until Charlie had given up and returned her, exasperated, to her mother.

Because heat was home. It was life and growth and Renee s face when it lit up with whatever new pleasure had seized her last. Bella guessed this was why anticipation and intrigue (and later joy and love) wrapped so stonily in vampiric ice, no matter how pretty the package, had taken some getting used to. And even so-even after-old habits died hard: during Edward's absence, hadn t she been blinded to everything but the welcome warmth of Jacob s sun?

By the time Alice returned, Charlie had remarked that she d actually been glowing. And if Charlie noticed, it could be assured that Renee would as well. "I don t know how you stand it," she'd remarked on the last afternoon of Bella and Edward s Jacksonville visit, after witnessing a chaste (even for them) embrace. "Even as a baby, you hated the cold."

Bella had gone rigid with shock until Edward had picked the intent from Renee's mind that she could not. "That's not true," she'd protested then, with perhaps a bit more passion than the observation warranted. "I told you, Forks is growing on me." And it was...the cold, the wet...it _had_ to, no matter how good the Floridian sun felt.

By 18 years old, fire and ice were ruling her life, each demanding to be heard over the crash and burn of the other, jockeying for position and forever marking her psyche with their ability to mar, to mold, to scar. She alternatively held both at bay-Edward s icy shoulder unyielding under one palm, Jacob s blazing skin burning into the other-and attempted vainly to meld the two together: _I'm Switzerland, and you're magnets; all we need to do is connect._

Within a year, it was killing her.

She knew it, Edward knew it, Jacob knew it. The only thing now defining her days was the predictable cold and heat: Jake s arms wrapped around her until the shivering stopped, Edward s cool cheek on her feverish one until the sweat subsided.

Each had stopped fighting the other, which is how she knew she was dying.

As it turned out, her favorite Frost poem was wrong. Fire did not trump ice, not in the mortal world or in hers. She supposed she d known this all along, because fire-passion, heat, warmth, light-belongs to the living, which is why it had glowed hot and bright within her for exactly three days with all the futility and arrogance and optimism of the living before burning itself out. And then the smoke had cleared and given way to something much more enduring: cold, immovable, timeless death.

Which, when the last of the ashes turned to dust (and the dust settled), was really just another word for immortality.


End file.
